The two genealogies of Jesus: 8 points from the sources

Matthew says that “Jacob عليه السلام was the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born” (1:16). Luke says that Jesus was “the son, as was supposed, of Joseph, the son of Heli” (3:23).^[1] Matthew names twenty-six generations from Solomon to Joseph, and Luke forty-one from Nathan to Joseph. Apart from two names in the middle, Shealtiel and Zerubbabel, which are discussed below, the two lists share no one between David عليه السلام and Joseph.^[2]

The difference goes far beyond a slip that a copyist might have made: the two lists are separate family trees. Any solution has to explain why two writers, both claiming to give the ancestry of Jesus through Joseph’s side, produced lists that diverge at David and never meet again except at one point.

The question is also older than Islam by many centuries. The emperor Julian, in his work Against the Galileans in the fourth century, pointed out that Matthew and Luke disagree about the genealogy of Jesus. Christian writers before him had already tried to resolve it.^[3]

The first Christian writer known to have addressed the problem in detail is Julius Africanus, in a letter to a certain Aristides written in the early third century and preserved by Eusebius. He proposed that Jacob and Heli were half-brothers, sons of the same mother by different fathers, one descended from Solomon and the other from Nathan. When Heli died without children, Jacob married his widow under the law of levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25:5–6), and Joseph was born. Joseph was therefore the natural son of Jacob, as Matthew says, and the legal son of Heli, as Luke says.^[4]

Africanus said that he had the explanation from the relatives of Jesus, who kept family records. He also wrote that it was not supported by documentary proof, and that he offered it because no better or truer one could be found.^[5] His solution was accepted by Eusebius and much of the early church.

Two difficulties remain with it. Levirate marriage was meant to give the dead brother a son in his own name, so the child would be counted in the line of the dead man, Heli, and the solution has to explain why Matthew counts Joseph as Jacob’s. And the solution requires that the mother of Jacob and Heli married first into Solomon’s line and then into Nathan’s, two branches of David’s family that had separated a thousand years earlier.

The explanation most often heard today is that Matthew gives the genealogy of Joseph and Luke that of Mary, with Heli as Mary’s father and Joseph listed as his son-in-law. Defenders point to the words “as was supposed” in Luke 3:23, and to Luke’s focus on Mary in the birth narratives.

The theory is not found in the early centuries. It was popularised at the end of the fifteenth century by Annius of Viterbo, and later adopted by a number of Protestant commentators.^[6] Luke’s text names Joseph and makes no mention of Mary in the genealogy. The phrase “as was supposed” qualifies the statement that Jesus was the son of Joseph, which fits Luke’s own account of the virgin birth. It does not say that the following names belong to someone else. The Greek construction runs the same way through the whole list, each man “of” the next, and gives no sign of a change from Joseph to Mary.

Raymond Brown, the Catholic scholar whose study of the infancy narratives is the standard work in English, concluded that both genealogies are meant as Joseph’s, that the attempts to harmonise them are unconvincing, and that the lists may have been compiled for theological purposes from different sources.^[7] Many Christian scholars today agree with him. A Christian who adopts the Mary theory is entitled to do so. He should know that it is a later solution and that some of the most respected scholars of his own tradition reject it.

Matthew arranges his list in three sets of fourteen generations: from Abraham to David, from David to the exile in Babylon, and from the exile to Christ, and he states the scheme in 1:17. The scheme only works because names are omitted.

Matthew 1:8 says that Joram was the father of Uzziah. The books of Kings and Chronicles show that three kings came between them: Ahaziah, Joash and Amaziah (2 Kings 8:24 to 15:1; 1 Chronicles 3:11–12).^[8] Matthew 1:11 says that Josiah was the father of Jeconiah and his brothers, leaving out Jehoiakim, who was Josiah’s son and Jeconiah’s father (1 Chronicles 3:15–16).^[9] And the third group, from the exile to Jesus, contains thirteen generations, not fourteen, unless Jeconiah is counted twice or Mary counted as a generation.^[10]

Biblical genealogies did sometimes skip generations, and Matthew may have intended the number fourteen as a symbol, since the Hebrew letters of the name David add up to fourteen. That is a reasonable account of his purpose. It also means that his list, by his own design, is selective, and that a reader who takes 1:17 at face value, “all the generations from David to the deportation to Babylon were fourteen”, is told something the Old Testament does not support.

Matthew’s list passes through Jeconiah, also called Jehoiachin or Coniah, the king taken to Babylon in 597 BCE (1:11–12). The prophet Jeremiah pronounced a judgment on him: “Write this man down as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days; for none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David and ruling again in Judah” (Jeremiah 22:30).^[11]

Jewish critics of Christianity have long pointed to this verse. If Jesus is the Messiah who will sit on David’s throne, and his descent is traced through Jeconiah, the prophecy seems to bar him.

The usual Christian answer is that Jesus was not Joseph’s natural son, so the curse on Jeconiah’s offspring did not pass to him. That answer has a cost. It means that Matthew’s genealogy gives Jesus only a legal descent from David, and that his natural descent must come from somewhere else. Luke’s list is then needed to supply it. Luke’s list, however, also includes Shealtiel and Zerubbabel (3:27), the same two men who appear in Matthew as Jeconiah’s son and grandson, and whom 1 Chronicles 3:17–19 places in Jeconiah’s family.^[12] Some defenders argue that Luke’s Shealtiel and Zerubbabel are different men with the same names. Others point to Haggai 2:23, where God calls Zerubbabel His signet ring, as a reversal of the curse.^[13] Both are possible readings, and both are answers made necessary by the lists themselves.

The meeting point of the two genealogies creates a further difficulty. Matthew says that Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel and Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel (1:12). Luke says that Shealtiel was the son of Neri (3:27). And 1 Chronicles 3:17–19, in the Hebrew text, says that Zerubbabel was the son of Pedaiah, Shealtiel’s brother, although Ezra, Nehemiah and Haggai call him the son of Shealtiel.^[14]

So the Bible names Jeconiah and Neri as the father of Shealtiel, and Shealtiel and Pedaiah as the father of Zerubbabel. Harmonisers explain this by another levirate marriage, or by adoption, or by two men of the same names. Each explanation may be true, and none is stated in the text.

The genealogies also have a textual history of their own, and it shows how early readers felt the difficulty.

Codex Bezae, a Greek and Latin manuscript of the Gospels from about 400, replaces Luke’s list from Joseph back to David with a list drawn from Matthew, reversed to run upward, and adds the kings that Matthew left out, Ahaziah, Joash, Amaziah and Jehoiakim, from the Old Testament.^[15] A scribe or editor who did this saw the conflict between the two Gospels and resolved it by making Luke agree with Matthew. Other manuscripts of Luke disagree among themselves over the names between Hezron and Amminadab in 3:33, where the editors of the Greek text have to choose among several readings.^[16]

Luke’s list also contains a name that the Hebrew Bible does not. Luke 3:36 makes Shelah the son of Cainan, and Cainan the son of Arphaxad. In the Hebrew text of Genesis 11:12 and 1 Chronicles 1:18, Shelah is the son of Arphaxad, and there is no Cainan. The extra generation comes from the Septuagint, which adds Cainan in Genesis 11.^[17] Luke, writing in Greek, followed the Greek Old Testament where it differed from the Hebrew. The site’s article on the Septuagint describes other places where the New Testament does the same.

A Christian may answer that Luke used the Bible his readers knew. That is fair. It also means that one of the two genealogies of Jesus contains a generation that the Hebrew Bible, which Christians say is unchanged, does not recognise. Either the Hebrew lost a name or the Greek added one.

The Christian difficulty has a cause that Muslims and Christians agree on. Both believe that Jesus had no human father. A genealogy traced through Joseph can at most make Jesus his legal heir, and both Gospels say so in their own way: Matthew by calling Joseph “the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born”, and Luke by adding “as was supposed”.

The Quran does not give Jesus a genealogy through any man. It calls him, more than twenty times, Isa ibn Maryam, Jesus son of Mary, a name that announces the virgin birth every time it is used.^[18] It places Mary in “the family of Imran”, whom God chose above the worlds together with Adam, Noah and the family of Abraham (3:33–36), and it records her mother’s vow to dedicate the child in her womb to God’s service.^[19] Mary is placed in a priestly family, which agrees with Luke’s statement that her relative Elizabeth was “of the daughters of Aaron” (Luke 1:5, 1:36).^[20]

A Christian may still hold that Jesus descends from David, through Mary or through Joseph’s adoption, and many do. The Muslim point is a modest one. The two Gospel genealogies raise questions that Christian scholars have debated since the third century, while the Quran’s way of naming Jesus avoids those questions and keeps his identity tied to his miraculous birth.